The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors.

Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them.

I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.

Interesting NPR segment today: A powerful eruption on the sun disrupted radio signals on earth. What’s remarkable is it’s a PhD candidate talking to an NPR host about solar flares, completely in two Southern Black accents. Two women, at that.

I am dismayed at my own involuntary racist reaction to these voices. I do not expect educated people to speak this kind of English. A crystal clear example of my prejudice. I know and respect Ayesha Rascoe’s work on NPR. India Jackson is a PhD candidate and clearly a domain expert. The segment is good, detailed at the right level for the NPR audience. But I hear the accent and my knee-jerk reaction is negative. In my defense I was raised to be like this and I am trying to be better.

My favorite moment is about 2 minutes in, discussing the threats to humanity from a solar flare:

RASCOE: Do we have any way to prevent that?
JACKSON: Oh, God, no. (LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: No, no.
JACKSON: No, no, no.
RASCOE: That’s not…
JACKSON: We cannot…
RASCOE: We don’t want to hear that, India.
JACKSON: We cannot prevent the sun from doing what she goin’ to do.

The way she delivers that last line, stretches “sun” to two syllables with an intense diphthong. It’s delightful! And effective. She’s discussing a complex topic in astrophysics and the frightening threats it poses to humanity. But then she uses a vernacular phrasing, “doing what she goin’ to do”, to highlight our impotence. She makes the topic relatable, almost friendly, a perfect tone for an NPR’s more casual weekend programming.

I hate this prejudice in me, that certain kinds of accents read as ignorant. I know I’m not alone in having it. I am glad this NPR segment challenged me.

The Trump campaign and his braintrust have been very clear and open about their planning for a second presidency, mostly under the umbrella of Project 2025. There’s been a lot of good journalism about it. Some examples:

• Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plan. Stephen Miller talking about plans to detain and deport millions of people living in America.
• Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term, the plan to turn the Department of Justice into an instrument of revenge against Trump’s enemies.
• Trump and Allies Forge Plans to Increase Presidential Power in 2025, a strategy to increase the President’s authority and ignore the traditional checks and balances of US government.
• A radical plan for Trump’s second term, details of how Trump would completely clear house in the executive branch and replace non-political civil servants with loyalists.
• Inside the Next Republican Revolution, more details of staffing control.
• Trump vows pardons, government apology to Capitol rioters if elected, a statement of support for the people who attempted the armed overthrow of the US government at Trump’s urging.
• Donald Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Hide His Authoritarian Second-Term Plans, a quick cultural and political analysis.

None of these articles are speculation or alarmist inflation. They are direct reporting of what they themselves are saying they plan to do. Not only does the Trump camp feel free to be so open in their extremism, they see it as an election asset.

I am no longer talking to politicians. I have been aggressively filtering my email, a constant battle. Now I will no longer accept their calls. Unfortunately my home phone number is ruined. Between scams and politicians I never answer my phone unless I recognize the caller ID.

I’m an active political donor, particularly for US Congress. But once you get seen as a mark who is willing to give $$$$ to a candidate, you get a lot of personal communications. Congresspeople call me several times a month. The email is overwhelming. I do not want to talk to people who pretend to be my friend for two minutes and then ask me for $3300.

The worst are the few politicians who’ve succeeded in making a connection with me. They’re personal on the phone, they took good notes, it feels like we have a conversation. But of course it’s all in service to their fundraising campaigns. They’re just good at pretending a polite social connection.

I’ve protected myself from spam by withholding my email address and phone number. But I started too late, that data is already out and widely shared. Candidates buy this information and abuse me. It’s mild corruption but worse it’s obnoxious. I am done with it.

I might still donate based on my own research. Toying with the idea of not donating to anyone who spams me too much.

Bonus: NGP VAN, the company that enables a lot of Democratic Party spam, is collapsing. Ever since Apax Partners bought them they’ve been laying off people and their meagre services are deteriorating. This is terrible for the Democrats, they don’t have a good alternative. It may make the spam problem worse too.

We’ve moved into a new phase of Covid-19 in America, the selfish phase. It disgusts me.

The image above is from a holiday party at a fancy business club in Texas. Everyone gets to make their own choice, see? Some folks say "no contact", some folks say "bring it on". Everyone gets to do what they think is best for themselves, what’s the problem?

We finally have Covid-19 vaccines. The primary discussion is whether people will choose to take them. Surely it should be everyone’s own personal decision? Some 40% of Americans think it might be OK for them to personally decide not to vaccinate themselves, as if their decision only affected them.

That is not how public health works.

The only way to control a highly contagious disease is to quarantine to slow the spread, then vaccinate so that a large majority of your population has immunity. Only then does the disease die down. The quarantine period is difficult and requires personal sacrifice for the common good. Americans refuse to do it. It’s against our very national nature, what we think of as the virtue of individualism. The flipside of that is selfishness.

I’m in a Facebook argument because someone in Nevada County thinks it’s "hateful" for me to answer a request about "which nail salons are open" with the comment that they all should be closed. The discussion instead is about how awful it is we can’t get our nails done, and it’s our choice anyway, and won’t everyone think of the poor nail salon workers who need jobs? Meanwhile our hospitals are at 100% capcity statewide and in the middle of the biggest outbreak of Covid-19 yet. But folks gotta get their nails done.

The sheer selfishness of it is revolting. Look also to our California political leaders going to big indoor dinner parties at lavish restaurants in defiance of social distancing rules. Or how it’s apparently everyone’s personal choice whether to wear a mask, ignoring the risk they put other people in. Or the millions of people travelling for Christmas. That same selfishness at Thanksgiving led to a major case growth; now that’s just going to be doubled.

I grappled with this question back in July and concluded the main reason I was being so careful about Covid isolation was to keep other people safe. That was about a month before the Sturgis motorcycle rally led to a major surge in the virus all over the middle of the country. I sure feel like a sucker now, I’m not sure why I’ve bothered.

America is a nation of selfish people. And it’s literally killing us. 330,000 and counting.

Well Biden didn’t win easily last night, so there’s lots of vote counting to come. The press is mostly saying Biden is likely to win, but it’s really not certain.

The immediate danger is Trump and his authoritarian speech he gave last night. It’s the most astonishingly anti-democratic thing I’ve ever heard an American president say. It should disqualify him immediately from holding any elected office in the US.

But it won’t, so we’re going to have an ugly knife fight in the coming weeks. Expect 2000 Florida style nastiness over vote counting in 5+ states. I just hope the disputes stay in polite court discussions and don’t turn into real violence.

Getting to a complete vote count will be hard, and it will be unpleasant, and it will be expensive. But the alternative is letting our country be stolen by an authoritarian who openly declares his intent to ignore the vote and just take power.

It’s been clear for awhile that Trump is very likely to lose a fair election. I’ve been worrying about what happens if the election is not fair. There’s a lot of ways the election can be stolen. We’ve been watching the Republicans fight tooth and nail to make it harder for people to vote these last weeks. They will keep fighting after the election to try to invalidate votes that were cast, which is where I think the real danger lies. But in this essay I want to focus on election day itself, intimidation at the voting place.

In general in America, intimidating voters is illegal. It is a federal crime to "intimidate, threaten, [or] coerce any other person for the purpose of interfering with the right of [that] other person to vote or to vote as he may choose." On Tuesday if you are intimidated or see voter intimidation, please report it. The ACLU-recommended hotline is 1-866-OUR-VOTE, the Democratic Party’s hotline is 1-833-336-8683, and the US DoJ’s hotline is 800-253-3931. Despite the law, America has a long ugly history of voter intimidation, particularly against Black voters.

The recent history starts with the Ballot Security Task Force of 1981. This was a group of Republican-organized off duty police officers hired in New Jersey to maraud African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods on election day. They verbally and physically intimidated voters and blocked access to the polls. This action and various other Republican-led voter suppression efforts were so egregious the Republicans were forced into a consent decree to not suppress the vote, with significant federal oversight. That agreement expired in 2017.

So now the Republicans no longer have their hands tied and seem to be reverting to various forms of voter suppression and intimidation. Many of them are murky and on the margins, so first let’s clarify the simplest cases of how voters could be intimidated.

US Military: It is illegal for the US military to be at polling places. 18 U.S. Code § 592 makes this very clear. No one considers this a real threat in 2020.

National Guard: it is legal for the various National Guards to help at polling places if requested by the state. Generally, unarmed and out of uniform. Mostly they’re asked to serve as poll workers; set up tables, help run the polling station. It’s historically been calm and uncontroversial. In 2020 there has been concern about some states calling up the National Guard for security; Greg Abbott in Texas, for instance. The assumption at the moment is they’re only on standby in case of violence. If they enter any polling stations armed or in uniform, it will be a very alarming turn of events.

State and local police: it depends on state law, but in many states it is legal for police to be at a polling place, in uniform and armed. In five states it’s required! Voter intimidation is still illegal, but it’s easy to see how the mere presence of an armed white cop watching voters could be intimidating for voters, particularly Black voters. It is what it is; the main problem to look for is a pattern of deliberate police intimidation.

Barr’s Army: this summer Trump and Barr created an unregulated paramilitary organization. They attacked peaceful protestors in Washington DC so that Trump could do a photo op, then later occupied parts of Portland for several weeks. Much of that army is made of civilian DHS agents who are not subject to military regulations. It’s entirely unclear whether it would be legal for this force to show up at a polling place, although it would certainly be a frightening turn to facism.

Unlawful militias: it is completely illegal for a random armed citizens group to show up at or near a polling place and intimidate voters. That doesn’t mean there’s no risk of it happening. The only appropriate response would be a swift capture and arrest by local or national law enforcement.

Poll watchers: there’s lots of room under "poll watchers" and "voting advocates" to have potentially hostile people in a polling place. Passive poll watching is fine, but it’s possible to abuse the role or the access to disenfranchise voters. Trump has made a lot of noise about having watchers to stop imaginary voting fraud, but "poll watching" is also a classic intimidation technique. There’s been some troubling signs of who’s being recruited to be poll watchers: ex-special forces and retired police in Minnesota for instance. Note the organization of those watchers is literally called Trump’s Army; the militarized language is not an accident.

Random people: I put this here because it’s just so American: in some states like Michigan an individual can carry a gun while voting. I assume it’d be illegal for them to do anything with the gun but why the hell is it even allowed?

That’s all the niceties of the law. The reality on the ground could be very different. If a few hundreds ICE thugs show up at a Philadelphia polling place on Tuesday in anonymous uniforms with grenades and assault weapons in hand, what’s going to happen? An emergency court order, several hours of chaos, and a suppressed vote. What if rumors spread in Detroit that there’s a group of militia guys running around threatening to shoot people near the polling places? How many people won’t take the risk to go vote?

The only thing stopping voting intimidation in the moment is basic decency. But the Republicans have a history of not caring about decency when it comes to voting rights. I don’t think they’d go so far as an armed coup but there’s plenty of room at the margins for intimidating enough voters to affect the vote. Know your rights. Report any intimidation: 1-866-OUR-VOTE. Trump is very likely going to lose a fair vote; do not let him steal this election.

Democrats can win a whole lot of seats in Congress this year, quite possibly even taking control of the Senate. There are 15 Senatorial elections that are not solid locks; of those, 13 are currently held by Republicans. And there’s some 64 close House races.

I just made 25 donations to campaigns for the Senate and the House. I hate the idea of paying in to American campaign financing and it’s a lot of work figuring out who to donate to. But making donations like this in 2018 made me feel like an active participant in the political process. It’s like buying tickets for your hometown baseball team, then keeping track of how your team does. It’s engagement. So I’m back again this year.

My main criterion is "support the Democrat in close races". I am not aiming for every candidate to win; that’d be money wasted. I give money where it might make a difference. Some more sophisticated people than me also look to donate in races that are underfunded or otherwise worth special attention. Swing Left does an excellent job packaging this kind of analysis up in a single one-stop donation form, plus advice on how you can volunteer your time. Read on here if you’d rather do it yourself.

My primary source of information for which races are close is the Cook Political Report: Senate and House. Ballotpedia is also a very useful source of information about specific races, including candidate funding and likelihood of winning. See their battlegrounds pages for more info: Senate and House. Finally the WashPo recently did a great article on Senate races that is a useful guide.

For the Senate, I ended up donating to 13 of 15 close races. The candidates are Gary Peters MI, Doug Jones AL, Mark Kelly AZ, John Hickenlooper CO, Jon Ossoff GA, Theresa Greenfield IA, Sarah Gideon ME, Cal Cunningham NC, MJ Hegar TX, Barbara Bollier KS, Jamie Harrison SC, Amy McGrath KY, and Steve Bullock MT. Alaska hasn’t had their primary yet, so I’m waiting on that. There’s also a special election in Georgia but the November race is effectively a jungle primary, so again I’m waiting. I only spent a couple minutes looking at each candidate’s political positions, mostly to verify they were OK on LGBT rights. I’m sure I disagree with some of them on some things.

For the House, in 2018 I mostly gave to the close California races. But this year there’s only 3 close races in CA, so I expanded my list to include 3 races I knew something about the candidate and then 5 more left-wing candidates from the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Justice Democrats. The candidates are Christy Smith CA-25, TJ Cox CA-21, Harley Rouda CA-48, Hiral Tipirneni AZ-06, Hillary Scholten MI-03, Lizzie Fletcher TX-07, Angie Craig MN-02, Matt Cartwright PA-08, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell FL-26, Andy Kim NJ-03, and Kara Eastman NE-02.

Finally I gave one special donation to my most local candidate: Audrey Denney for CA-01 including Grass Valley, CA. The Cook Report doesn’t show it as a close race but I think it’s closer than it looks; the current Republican LaMalfa is a real loser, less popular even than Donald Trump. And Denney ran a strong campaign in 2018 and is looking even better this year.

Donating online is remarkably easy; all but one of these candidates are using ActBlue, an excellent product. See my earlier blog post about avoiding spam when you donate; in particular do not give ActBlue or any candidate your phone number or primary email address.

I would like to add a caveat to all this optimism, which is that I’m basing it on there being a fair vote. But I give a ~10% chance of massive voting fraud conducted by the GOP resulting in a deeply unfair election. Not just the usual voter suppression and structural bias towards the GOP. But some broad and enormous combination of invalidating or not counting vote-by-mail ballots and using Barr’s Army to intimidate vote counters similar to what was done in Miami in 2000. I honestly don’t know how to fight this kind of coup, the best I’ve done so far is donate to voting rights agencies like the Brennan Center and the ACLU.

America has failed to contain Covid-19. It seems the virus will continue to spread unchecked and every American will be exposed in the next few months. So now what? Is there any point in even trying to isolate?

I feel like people haven’t yet recognized the magnitude of our failure to control the disease. We are at 45,000 new cases a day; a significant increase over the early April peak of 30,000. And the rate is accelerating. We have uncontrolled growth in the wake of states relaxing social restrictions. There’s now a move to improve distancing a little bit but the only thing that would stop this kind of spread is a lockdown even more severe than those of March and April. No one is talking about doing that.

To be clear, this loss of control is a uniquely American failure. Compare to Germany, Spain, Canada and China. All had an infection spike, some quite a bit higher on a per capita basis. All tamed the disease and are now finding 0-10 new cases a day. Pretty much all developed countries have controlled this disease; you have to look to Brazil for a catastrophe as bad as ours.

We gave up on containment. My question is… now what? We seem to have accepted that the whole country is going to be exposed to Covid-19. Is there any point in trying to socially isolate or distance now? Why go through enormous restrictions on your personal life if you’re just going to get infected anyway despite best precautions? If 10% of the people in your town are infected, the only way you’re going to avoid getting it yourself is extreme isolation. Washing your hands and trying to maintain six feet from others isn’t going to save you, particularly when the Trump mouth breathers around you won’t even wear a mask.

The main communal reason I see to continue to distance is to try to at least slow the spread down. The pressing danger now is we get a big enough spike in critical cases that hospitals are overwhelmed and people start dying again for lack of medical care. A miserable year+ of semi-lockdown might help. That seems to be what California is governing too, at least. But that’s an altruistic argument. My own personal case isn’t going to overwhelm the hospitals, so why deprive myself?

For me the personal motivation to continue to maintain isolation is moral. I don’t want to get sick, but I really really don’t want to get other people sick. Like my partner Ken, who is old enough there’s a significant risk to his life if he gets a bad case. So I feel like I have a moral responsibility to continue to distance myself. It’s very hard to maintain that standard when so many Americans don’t.

Our government has completely failed to protect the public welfare. Trump’s deadly ignorance is well documented and bears a lot of the blame. The Republican leadership mostly repeats his Covid denialism. But the Democrats aren’t doing much better. Here in California, Newsom’s informed and well-meaning policies seem to be failing nearly as badly as the ruinous Republican policies in Texas and Florida. We have week-long delays for test results, not enough contact tracing, and uncontrolled spread in half the state. Even my little small town mayor has failed her people.

America is simply incapable of dealing with a national health crisis. We’ve defaulted into a path where everyone gets sick and too bad for the millions who will die. We have failed. What’s the appropriate personal response?

A friend from Houston posted an article on Facebook: Daughter of Astros legend Ken Caminiti calls out racism she experienced growing up in Pecan Grove. She talks eloquently about the racism inherent in the street names of Pecan Grove, TX, a 1970s-era Houston suburb.

When your white children tell their black friends that they live on Plantation Dr, Confederate Ct, or Brown School Ct, these black children do not think of streets, they think of racism.

Pecan Grove being largely white, there’s some pushback to that criticism. And the immediate cry of "don’t make us change the street names! Don’t erase history!". That got me curious about Pecan Grove’s actual history, beyond the romantic racism of "Old Dixie Dr".

Mind you, I’ve spent all of thirty minutes on this, a real historian could do a much better job. But even with such little effort I did better than the neighborhood’s own history page, which presents Pecan Grove as springing fully out of nowhere in 1973. This online history is a little better and in particular highlights the presence of the Hunter Plantation. Which was presumably mostly sugar but had one fine pecan tree as well, hence the name. I’m not 100% certain Pecan Grove is built exactly on the Hunter Plantation land, I did not do that research, but given their excitement to use the word “Plantation” on parks and street names I think it’s likely connected.

The Hunter Plantation founder Johnson Calhoun Hunter was one of the Old Three Hundred, some of the first white non-Spanish settlers in the area. His children took over the plantation and ran it right through the slave years and on until about 1900.

The Hunters were slavers. According to the 1860 Slave Schedules they owned at least 53 slaves. Thomas Hunter (born 1821) listed his occupation as "Overseer" in 1850 and "farmer" in 1860. He owned 39 people. Martha Hunter (born 1790) owned 13. William Hunter (born 1830) only owned 4 human beings. A disappointment to the family, I’m sure.

Sadly, the Slave Schedules tell us next to nothing about the victims themselves, the slaves. No names, no histories. The ages are pretty horrifying though. 16 of Thos’ chattel slaves were fourteen or younger. Do you suppose Thos waited for the little girls to reach puberty before taking "his privilege" on them? Did he force the 55 year old men to work in the fields? Wm’s slaves were 33, 24, 31, and 10. Martha had a 4 month old baby to call her own.

How many slaves do you suppose are buried in unmarked graves under the suburban streets? I wonder what happened to them after Emancipation. Something tells me they aren’t living in Pecan Grove now.

Pecan Grove does have a Plantation Memorial Park. But it’s not a memorial to the slaves who worked and died at the plantation. It’s a memorial to military veterans. Which is certainly fine (it’s not a Confederate memorial), but one wonders why the word Plantation is on it. Pride in their white heritage, no doubt.

Like everyone I’m riding out this Covid-19 lockdown with a mix of depression, anxiety, anger, boredom. And obsessively reading every detailed quality article I can find about both the disease and the politics around the disease. And it’s just all too much. Ordinarily my goal is to research something and get at some truth people don’t know about, then report it. I did this a couple of weeks ago about an unfounded theory that SARS-CoV-2 was in California last fall.

But right now there’s so many awful things going on. And I go deep on some topic and it doesn’t matter because it’s just all too much. People don’t care about the details of some particular nuance of antibody test specificity and Bayesian statistics. They just want to know "is the medical science going to make us safe?" "Are our politicians doing a good job helping us be safe?"

The top level answer on medical science is "science will make us safe, but it takes time". The top level on the politics is "America is doing a terrible job". The Trump administration is full of vandals and science deniers. Trump himself seems worried only in trying to save his re-election chances and lurches day to day to new outrages. Some of the states, including California, are doing better but it’s all going way too slow. My particular anger is focussed on the lack of testing capacity. We are way below what we need to safely reopen the country.

Anyway, it’s all too much. So rather than meticulously run down a bunch of complicated stories I’m just going to list a bunch of the big outrages with minimal references, just so I don’t lose track or forget that they have happened.

• 50,000 Americans confirmed dead of Covid-19 today.
• 2500+ American dying every day of the disease.
• Trump’s denying the disease was important, wasting six weeks.
• Armchair epidemiologists arguing about what the "true" death rate of Covid-19 is.
• An enormous lack of testing capacity.
• Federal government refusing to provide medical supplies to states that need them, telling them to buy their own.
• Federal government stealing medical supplies from states.
• Federal government distributing medical supplies with political favoritism.
• Potential fraudulent diversion of Federally-seized medical supplies.
• Trump’s fixation on Chloroquine, an unproven medical treatment. causing a shortage for proven uses of the medicine. It turns out to not work.
• Trump suggesting we inject "disinfectant" into Covid-19 patients.
• Trump firing the US leader on vaccine development because he was skeptical of unproven medical treatments.
• Trump simultaneously saying it’s up to the states to choose when to re-open and then undermining those states’ decisions.
• Trump and his campaign’s apparent cooperation with far right wing groups astroturfing "reopen America" protests.
• Trump shutting down some immigration including green card applications.
• Enormous economic cost to the country and the world.
• Whole industries decimated; hospitality foremost.
• The stomach-churning gyrations of the crude oil market.
• Failed government stimulus for small businesses.
• Republicans doing everything they could to suppress a fair election in Wisconsin, including forcing people to risk their lives to vote.
• Trump declaring war against voting by mail, our best hope for having a fair and safe election in November.
• A $2T aid package where the oversight committee was sabotaged before it started.
• Mendacious one-time personal payout delayed so Trump could put his name on the checks.
• Fascists threatening the life of Anthony Fauci, the one trusted medical leader in this crisis.
• CDC’s failure of leadership.
• CDC’s failure to produce a working test, including weeks of screwing around with a contaminated test and an overcomplicated design.
• Republican sabotage of the CDC, the pandemic response team, and the WHO.
• Appointing a crude and vicious racist to be spokesman of Health and Human Services.

It’s not a comprehensive list, it’s just the outrages of the last two months I could remember offhand. It’s too much.

If you made it all the way to the bottom of this bummer post, let me give you one silver lining in the Covid-19 cloud. J. Kenji López-Alt, my favorite food nerd, has been doing an excellent series of home cooking videos. They are a delight.

I have some tips for avoiding the spam that inevitably follows from making political donations. It’s not perfect, but it helps.

The problem: I donated to 10 congressional candidates in 2018. This election cycle I’ve gotten personalized fundraising requests from about 40 candidates; a few of those 10, a lot unrelated. Email, cell phone calls, it’s never-ending. I feel like I’m being punished for supporting my candidates. How to stop it?

The cause: campaign donations are public records. Any time you give money to any campaign or party, your contact info goes to the FEC who then publishes a list of every donation made in the country. This information quickly gets picked up by the political parties and other data brokers into something called "the voter file", a giant spreadsheet with 2000+ rows for every voter and donor in the US. Your name, your address, your phone number, your email, your donation history, and a bunch of direct marketing data like demographics, political leanings, etc. It is basically impossible to avoid getting on this file.

The solution: give the bare minimum information when donating. I believe this is name, address, and employer. Phone number is explicitly not required; leave it blank or make one up (I use an obviously fake number). Email address is definitely not required by law, although many online sites do require it themselves. For those I use special burner email addresses, things like nelson+polspam@monkey.org. Sometimes that makes it easier to filter in Gmail.

A special note about ActBlue, the online donation platform for most Democrats. They’re great! They also have a very clear privacy policy where they only share your info with the receiver of the donation and the legally required FEC. However they do also share email and phone even if they don’t have to; that fake phone number and burner email can be a help.

Even if you put all this in place carefully stuff will leak through. Given a person’s name and address you can quickly find all sorts of extra data about them, particularly once you go to marketing databases that have been around 30+ years. They will end up with your cell phone and email and spam text you anyway. There seems to be no way avoiding it entirely.

One special trick for cell phones: reply to spam with the text STOP. Legitimate actors will typically honor that, although I’m not sure it’s perfect.

A request for my friends who work in voting data: please, please have some sort of opt out database. One central list of "this person really does not want to be contacted via cell phone". I know it looks like it will harm your business, but the unstoppable intrusion on donors’ lives will also harm your business.

I fear a lot of white people in America don’t understand the pervasiveness of our culture of white supremacy. Growing up I was indoctrinated in racism and white supremacy and it’s taken many years to understand how those hateful ideas have invaded my mind and try to influence every aspect of my thinking. I think most white Americans are similarly indoctrinated and don’t recognize it. As we face a violent flareup of white supremacy in our current political world it’s important to understand how entrenched the idea is in white Americans that we are superior and the country belongs to us, the "real Americans". Recognizing this indoctrination is the first step in fighting it.

My grandmother was my personal teacher for white supremacy. Growing up in the 70s and 80s in Houston as a rich white boy, I was immersed in the culture of white superiority that is the birthright of most white Americans. But it was my grandmother who taught me the specifics. Content warning: the rest of this post discusses racist indoctrination in frank terms. It’s an awful thing, but it is my history and I need to claim it.

My grandmother, Lou Ward Jones, was a hateful woman in many ways both personal and petty and also large and broad. She was a virulent unrepentant racist, albeit a socially acceptable one. She was careful not to say N— out loud where polite people would hear her. That word was saved for moments of anger and for my private education. She interacted with Black people: the waiters in restaurants, a live-in maid in her house. But never as an equal. She wasn’t terrible to "her" maids but also was certainly not kind. That servant / familial relationship that is the uncomfortable way of the South.

Here’s some of the things my grandmother taught me

• Black people were better off under slavery.

• The South was the blameless victim of the Civil War.

• The maitre’d at the Houston Country Club was called "boy". Occasionally to his face and often deliberately in his hearing. A polite and professional Black man of age 50, he would smile and say "yes Mrs. Jones."

• Slaves were happy, their masters took good care of them.

• Brazil nuts were called n— toes, this word taught with an impish smile like a naughty girl getting away with something.

• Desmond Tutu was only a "so-called Archbishop".

• Little Black Sambo was great and it was terrible you couldn’t buy the books any more. I may still believe this one a tiny bit.

• The KKK was a necessary civil defense force to protect whites from rampaging N—s.

• Nelson Mandela was a criminal and it was terrible that he shared a name with her husband and me.

• N—s were and are too lazy or stupid to care for themselves.

• Martin Luther King was violent and wanted to kill white people.

These are some of the nuggets of white supremacy I was taught growing up during weekend visits. Not as a programmatic thing, just the background radiation of the white South. But my grandmother made an explicit effort to indoctrinate me. It seemed entirely unremarkable to me at the time, a lot of white people I grew up around talked this way. I absorbed these lessons from my family just like any little kid does.

Fortunately I learned better. My mother would occasionally push back; while she thoughtlessly harbored racism herself she also knew her mother’s racism was wrong. She made it clear I would not be calling the maitre’d "boy". My school did a good job teaching critical thinking and historical facts somewhat free of Southern bias, particularly my junior year US History class. And I developed my own ideas of social justice starting in high school. I became skeptical, anti-racist, argued back. Not so much against my grandmother though; she was a cruel and abusive woman and none of us talked back to her. I learned to hate her instead.

But the indoctrination was strong. The core message was that as a white person I was inherently superior. That these other races of people were here to be servants, or dumb labor, and while regrettably we couldn’t own them any more we could still treat them as lesser people. No matter what challenges I faced I was white and America belonged to me. It’s a comforting and empowering belief, being raised a white supremacist. It is poison.

I’m sorry to write out all this hateful and horrible stuff. But so much of white America is still awash in these attitudes, infected with them. I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to get out of the grip of this indoctrination and I still have tendrils of it in me. Pervasive racism is the single biggest social challenge facing America today, one of the core reasons why roughly half the American population starts life with a significant disadvantage. It goes a long way to explaining Trump’s popularity; people voted for him because he’s a racist, not despite that. This is America.

The Supreme Court yesterday heard a case about whether the US census can include a question on whether the person is a citizen, a question placed there by Wilbur Ross for the Trump administration. They’ve already lost this case in three federal courts but now it’s going to the Supreme Court. Despite the politics, there’s some important non-political arguments here that matter and aren’t being well reported. Let me highlight them.

The goal of the decennial census is an accurate count of all people. The basis of the Census comes from Article 1 Section 2 of the Constitution as amended by the 14th Amendment. The key phrase here is "counting the whole number of persons in each State". Not counting just citizens. In particular, representatives to the House are apportioned based on the entire population of each state, not just the population of citizens.

The accuracy of the count matters. It directly affects the number of House of Representatives seats and also Electoral College votes. The count also greatly influences funding apportionment, social security, etc. It’s not just statistical data for planning purposes, it is the count of record for all sorts of legislative matters.

The citizenship question would result in an undercount. The problem with the citizenship question is it will cause a lot of non-citizens to not answer the census and thus not be counted. It’s not hard to imagine why someone who is living here illegally would not want to disclose that fact to a federal officer, particularly now. But the citizenship question also discourages people who are here legally. Don’t take my word for it: the Census’ Chief Scientist John Abowd said "Three distinct analyses support the conclusion of an adverse impact on self-response and, as a result, on the accuracy and quality of the 2020 Census."

We already ask about citizenship. In addition to the decennial census, the Census Bureau also runs a fantastic demographic research program called the American Community Survey. They send detailed questionnaires of various types to a subset of American households, some every month, and collect detailed data on ethnicity, education, economics, even a count of how many people own computers. The ACS also asks about citizenship; here’s a quick view of the some of data.

We know the citizenship question will result in an undercount because of the ACS’ experience with the question. They have detailed estimates of how many people don’t answer the census at all, don’t answer the citizenship question, or quit the survey right where the citizenship question is asked. Abowd’s memo about this is long (100MB PDF), here’s a shorter relevant excerpt. Broadly speaking there’s two separate concerns; that the census taker doesn’t answer the one citizenship question, or that they don’t answer the whole census because of the presence of that one citizenship question. There’s corroborating studies from outside Census that also show the question will result in a significant undercount.

The decennial census has to be an exact count. Thanks to a 1999 Supreme Court decision the Census data used for apportionment must be an actual head count. No form of sampling or extrapolation is allowed, despite the fact that would result in a number closer to the true count. That means there’s no way to correct a census flawed with an undercount from the citizenship question.

I’ve tried to present politically neutral arguments above. How do we most accurately get an exact count of people in the US? By not adding a new question about citizenship. But of course the politics of the census can’t be ignored. The Census estimates 6.5M people may be undercounted because of this question, that’s nearly 2% of the US population. The people being undercounted tend to be Hispanic and immigrants and also tend to be pro-Democrat. Those people will be denied representation in the House and those states will be underfunded.

It’s not an accident that this question the Republican administration wants to ask just happens to help Republicans. It’s there because Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach asked Wilbur Ross to put it there, a fact that Ross apparently forgot about in earlier testimony. Ross tried to claim the Justice Department asked him to add the question but it turns out they only asked because Ross requested they ask him. The White House is now refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into how the question came to be on the census in the first place. There’s a detailed timeline of the political process. It’s gone much faster than the usual multi-year process for questions to carefully be added to the Census.

The Census Bureau is a competent, careful, non-partisan government agency. It’s a shame to see their work corrupted.

Reminder: it is not normal for the President of the United States to openly embrace the language of fascism.

I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump – I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

Update: Trump tweeted a link to his interview, then deleted it after someone inspired by him murdered 49 people in New Zealand.

I’ve had a mantra since Trump was elected: "it is going to keep getting worse". It’s depressing but I find being clear helps bolster me for the upcoming pain. There is no realistic scenario where the next two years in America are going to go better politically.

The midterms were a success for the Democrats. They decisively took the House. A victory, hooray! But what does that victory get us? Very little. At best, it slows down the horrible deluge of atrocities that are still coming.

Trump will remain President. There’s no likely path to an actual impeachment; even if Mueller has clear evidence of treason the Republicans in the Senate will protect Trump. And if they decide to get rid of Trump the result would be President Pence. That may be less stupid and crazy but Pence is also a bad and dangerous politician. And it is the entire Republican party that is the problem, not just Trump, and they will remain in power.

The best outcome from these midterms is the Democrats will use the investigatory powers of the House to unearth some of the Trump Administration’s crimes and malfeasance. (There’s an active debate on how aggressive the Democrats want to be.) A little truth-and-reconciliation would help things. Unearth the Trump Organization’s financial double dealings that corrupt the presidency. Get to the bottom of how our country stole thousands of children from their parents at the border and then lost several hundred of them, permanently orphaning the kids. Expose the Republican strategy of denying people voting rights to win elections. A little fresh air will feel good but it won’t actually change anything. We are way, way beyond where appeals to truth or decency matter.

Meantime, the Republicans will continue their campaign of vandalism. They will continue to undermine Obamacare. They will continue to demonize immigrants in a rank display of racism. They will continue to undermine LGBT rights, particularly transgender peoples’. They will continue to destroy our economy with reckless tax cuts. If not via legislation, then via executive action.

And forget our government taking normal action on necessary things like funding infrastructure, improving healthcare, setting reasonable foreign policy. Gridlock is better than active harm, but the best we have to hope for is gridlock.

That’s normal politics. It could get much worse. Trump is entirely unpredictable. It seems quite likely he will draw a page from the Putin playbook and start a war next year to help galvanize support for his re-election. Maybe Iran, Venezuela, Yemen. Maybe some "shithole" country he decides to attack. Nothing will stand in his way of creating a war.

Even that’s somewhat normal by American experience (see: 2003 in Iraq). The scariest thing to me is the rising fascism in American political rhetoric. The increasing appeals to violence. The demonizing of journalism. The frighteningly aggressive rhetoric of Trump’s rallies. The gun and bomb attacks by brownshirts. I was genuinely afraid the 2018 elections would be marred by some violent event, a mass shooting at a polling place or something. I’m glad I was wrong. I’m not going to be any less worried about that after two more years of Trump.

The country is breaking.

The first phase of undoing the Republican policy of separating children from their parents at the border is over. The July 26 deadline to reunite all families passed; the result is about ⅓ are together again. The details of the other thousands of parents and kids are complicated. For example 431 parents were deported without their children, it’s not clear they will ever be reunited. 21 kids are still separated because their parents failed a background check. According to past reports, some kids or their parents are simply just lost, the system can’t find them.

The pain of this separation policy will continue for years. Right now we still have to make sure every single other child separated from their parents is treated humanely and legally and eventually reunited with their family. Long term, the mental health of some of these kids will be permanently harmed by the trauma of separation and incarceration. And we’ve yet to hear about any abuses inside the detention system; given past experience there are horrors to come.

The whole thing has been an atrocity. A deliberate policy of white nationalism enacted by the Trump Administration and the Republican Party. It’s one thing to have differing opinions on immigration quotas or asylum procedures. It is another entirely to snatch children from their mothers. America committed a deliberate human rights abuse. Trump’s rhetoric demonizing and dehumanizing immigrants set the stage. The deep racism of many Americans encouraged this outrage along with the silent complicitly of so many citizens who want to just ignore an atrocity as it happens.

For the past six weeks I’ve been making an effort to tweet every single day about the unfolding story. I’ve been worried it’d be far too easy for this human rights crisis to go unnoticed, for us to forget that there were thousands of children living in cages and crying for their parents. So I’ve carefully read every single story I could find, highlighted something new every single day. I can’t keep that level of engagement up going forward. It seems absurd to allow this atrocity to just go on the pile along with all the other horrible Trump outrages. This particular event, the abuse of children, is singularly evil.

Between May 5 and June 9 at least 2,342 children were snatched from their parents because of a Trump / Republican policy change. That new policy was suspended June 20 but the children are still separated. They joined another 1,768 kids that were taken from their parents Oct 2016 – Feb 2018. As of last week there were a total of 11,869 children being held in HHS custody. These numbers sound comfortingly precise but the reality is a lot more confused. The immigrant child custody system has never worked well and was stressed significantly by adding 25% more kids in one month.

So where are the kids? The government has not published a comprehensive list or map. Several journalism agencies are trying: Reveal and ProPublica both have maps of immigration detention facilities for children, based in part on data from the Texas Tribune. These range from a 10 bed Catholic shelter in the Bronx to a converted Walmart for 1500 kids in Brownsville, TX. So far the reporting is that these shelters have been treating children decently. But between the strain on the shelter system and the historical lack of oversight it seems likely more kids will be abused. Just being separated from their parents is hugely damaging.

What’s next for the kids? The June 20 executive order reduces the number of children being separated in the future but does nothing to help the ones who were already snatched. This CNN timeline summarizes court decisions on what happens next.

• July 6: parents must be able to contact their children
• July 10: children under 5 reunited with their parents
• July 26: all children reunited with their parents

It seems likely that “reunited with their parents” means “placed into immigrant detention with their parents”. This creates a new problem, kids can only be held in immigrant jails for 20 days. So far there is no solution proposed for that limit. Expect another crisis maybe as early as July 10.

Some of the snatched kids have already been given back to their parents. But it’s very unclear how the rest of the kids will be reunited. HHS is talking like they have excellent records. But lawyers for parents say that’s not really true. Many parents don’t have legal representation at all, no help for finding their kids. There’s also a lot of confusion as some parents may have already been deported and various kids have different statuses. The fact that HHS says they are building a system now does not inspire confidence; is that system going to be working and complete in two weeks?

The separation policy is an atrocity. It was deliberately engineered to cause significant harm to children for political gain. The baffling array of different motivations stated for the policy only added to the confusion. But two stated reasons for taking kids away stand out as clearly important. One, to create a deterrent to future immigrants. And two, to create pressure in Congress to change immigration law. Holding 2,342 children hostage for these goals is monstrous.

I literally lay awake at night wondering about what is happening to these children. I feel powerless to do much to help them. I’ve given money, I’ve marched in protest, I’ve called my Congressman. Lately I’ve been trying to tweet one humanizing thing about these kids a day, just to keep some attention on a continuing human rights crisis.

Like any other decent human I’ve been horrified at the atrocity of Trump and the Republicans separating children from their parents. The immediate crisis seems to be over but there’s still an immense need for legal aid for immigrants. To try to unite the snatched kids back with their parents, to help asylum seekers in need. Every person deserves legal representation.

I went looking for well organized legal aid charities in California that I could donate to. I asked on Reddit and Metafilter and found a few helpful lists of organizations: San Francisco Magazine, Slate, Immigration Advocates Network.

I ended up having a hard time picking California specific organizations because there are so many small groups and I don’t know how to evaluate them all. Here’s what I ended up donating to:

• Kids in Need of Defense (Charity Navigator)
  National: “Ensuring that no child appears in immigration court without high quality legal representation.”
• Centro Legal de la Raza (Charity Navigator)
  Bay Area: “promotes access to justice for thousands of individuals and families each year throughout Northern and Central California”
• RAICES (Charity Navigator)
  Texas: “free and low-cost legal services to underserved immigrant children, families, and refugees”. They’ve gotten a huge amount of attention and it looks like they can put all this money to good use.

America is treating immigrant children as subhuman, taking them from their parents, abusing them, losing them. Social media is full out of outrage about this so it seems a bit redundant to write it all down. But it is an atrocity that is happening and the least I can do is bear witness.

America has a newly aggressive policy of separating children from parents if ICE thinks the parents entered the country illegally. It is a supreme form of cruelty being perpetrated by the state, often against families fleeing persecution and trauma.

Once separated from their parents we harm the children further. Some of those children are physically abused by Border Patrol officers, kids being punched, kicked, sexually assaulted, held in solitary confinement. ICE then destroys the evidence of the abuse. Many kids are placed in foster care but then we lose a large number of them, like literally don’t know what happened to them. Some of them ended up in the hands of traffickers. “Sorry Mom, we lost your kid, check the local brothels.” This problem is not new but much worse under Trump.

All of this is happening in the dangerous context of dehumanizing immigrants.

“I called them animals the other day, and I was met with rebuke,” he said. “They said, ‘They’re people.’ They’re not people. These are animals, and we have to be very, very tough.”
“They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors.” Trump added: “They look so innocent. They’re not innocent.”

See, they’re not immigrant children at all. They are criminals. And animals. So it’s OK to abuse them, to separate them from their parents.

It is going to keep getting worse.

This week seems to have broken a lot of my friends politically. Lots of folks withdrawing, feeling despair, etc. Me too, only I may reached that point a week or two ago.

The final straw this week seems to be the new Republican tax law. Cynically creating an enormous new deficit to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. While raising taxes on middle class people, particularly in high tax states like California and New York. It is a terrible law that will cause significant harm to our country. Combined with the destruction of the Affordable Care Act it will bring misery to many Americans.

But there’s so much more awfulness. The sexual misconduct revelations are a constant reminder of how shitty so many men are. Topped off by our Sexual Predator in Chief and his not-quite endorsement of child botherer Roy Moore. Trump’s tweets of anti-Muslim hate propaganda. The reversal of net neutrality. Trump’s off the cuff insults against Native Americans. Ongoing efforts to suppress the vote. Lurching towards nuclear war with North Korea with a State Department stripped of competency.

The only “bright spot”, as it were, is Mueller’s investigation. As if discovering the President’s staff worked with Russian intelligence to subvert the US election is somehow a positive thing. It’s not, it’s terrible, and so far we’ve done nothing to make the 2018 election more secure. Also it’s not really not clear that Mueller can save the Republic even with ironclad evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia. The Republicans hold the power and have shown themselves completely uninterested in decency or the rule of law. Remember the outcome of the Iran-Contra affair?

It’s going to get worse. It may not get better. He may get us all killed.

One crucial political aim for 2018 and 2020 is making sure the vote is fair and representative. The GOP has a clear strategy for voter suppression. They also will try to further cement their control of the House starting in 2020 with gerrymandering. Here are some people working to protect voters’ rights.

Jason Kander is leading the fight against voter suppression with the organization Let America Vote. Right now that’s mostly agitation against Trump’s voter suppression committee but it’s backed by legal and political action. (Kander is hilarious on Twitter, I enjoy following his personal account.) The ACLU is also very active in protecting voting rights.

I’ve been spending a lot of time educating myself about gerrymandering. The #1 thing I’d recommend is the book Ratf**ked; the New Yorker review gives a summary. That book is mostly a report on REDMAP, the GOP districting effort in 2010 (and now 2020). The DNC’s districting effort in 2020 is the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by Eric Holder. They’ve been relatively quiet but that may be because it’s mostly a technical and per-state issue.

The big news in gerrymandering this fall is the Wisconsin case, to be heard in the Supreme Court in October. It is considering the question about whether an explicitly partisan gerrymander is legal. There’s a lot of excitement about a measure called the efficiency gap which quantifies partisan bias. I’m doing a little work in this area myself, there’s a fun statistics + maps problem there.

I’ve left out a third topic, protecting the vote from foreign influence. I’m not as up to date on that topic. Also it’s a bit different in that voting security should be a bipartisan issue. Unfortunately a bunch of Republicans are ignoring obvious evidence of Russian election tampering as a misguided attempt to protect Trump. Secure voting machines and easy auditability are important themes.

There’s a kerfuffle going on with an NYTimes article about Trump and Xi. Trump calls the article fake news, saying it doesn’t describe his phone call on Thursday with Xi. But the online article starts with that phone call! What’s going on?

The confusion is the print edition of the article does not include the call. You can see that in this screenshot of the front page I took from Newseum. The article was then later updated online to include more facts, including the call.

The current online article is excellent reporting and, I think, accurate. The print edition was probably also accurate at the time it was published; it seems likely the NYTimes had not yet been informed of the Xi call. The problem is the edit to the online article isn’t disclosed to readers. And so everyone’s left confused, including journalists. One of the article authors even retweeted a smug tweet from another NYT reporter mocking Trump’s reading comprehension. But it seems likely to me Trump simply read the older print article.

One of Trump’s weapons is creating distrust for the media. It’s important for newspapers of record to do everything they can to avoid confusion. The NYT really needs a policy of disclosing edits to online articles.

It’s been a terrible weekend politically, with Trump’s hateful and foolish immigration order and the backlash to it. But how bad is it really? I’ve been mulling over this terrifying essay by Yonatan Zunger that’s making the rounds of techies, Trial Balloon for a Coup?. And contrasting it to Larry Lessig’s calm essay about the power of American constitutional process.

Zunger’s essay is powerful and, I think, well intentioned. He argues that the immigration circus this weekend was the Trump administration testing whether they could seize total political power. It takes some basic facts about the horrible things the Trump administration is doing and mixes them with some speculation such as the Rosneft deal and comes to a conclusion that the American Republic is about to end. If this essay is correct, the rational response is to flee the country immediately.

Lessig’s essay is a calm entreaty to resist Trump via normal legal and constitutional procedures. Specifically the need for Congress to step up and lead the fight. I agree the Democratic congressional leadership is very disappointing right now. I want Lessig’s worldview to be right, because it means my home is not about to explode in a civil war.

But which is true? I’m less certain than I’d like to be. I think the conclusion Zunger comes to is too extreme to be correct. It reads to me like “Obama’s comin’ for yer guns” or "FEMA orders $1B in coffins" rhetoric. There are some threads of truth there but they’re spun together in an inflammatory way to make the most terrifying conclusion. I think it’s bordering on irresponsible fearmongering and distracts us from meaningful resistance.

America is going to hell through constitutional means, no coup necessary. The Trump administration is using its authority to enact a series of policies that will greatly diminish this country. And they are doing so with complete contempt for truth, decency, or democratic norms. I really hope Lessig is right and that fighting back through legal means is possible. I’m not willing to believe a coup is coming, but this last weekend has me rattled.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Reichstag Fire lately.

Interesting pair of maps showing the route of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline

The upper map is the official map from Energy Transfer Partners. It is remarkably free of detail. Enter Carl Sack’s map below, which contains a lot more detail and was designed explicitly to help oppose the pipeline. It’s objectively a better map in many ways, particularly showing the locations of rivers and the Sioux Reservation.

It’s also notable that Sack includes the “Unceded Sioux Territory”. My understanding (and I could be wrong) is that land has disputed legal status today, the result of a broken treaty with the Sioux. The passing of this pipeline through that land is a key part of the dispute, though, and mapping it helps us understand the protest against the pipeline’s passage through that land.